It hasn't yet horribly broken anything on me yet, so that's good; at least for now. Took a second to figure out how to get things back on the tool bar and where some options went (like History -> restore previous session), but nothing broken yet.

The 'feel' reminds me strongly of whatever UI design fad took over the phone market, and rounded tabs are... different I guess.

Hi! I'd like to give some feedback as part of the 'early 20's' age-group, which I have to infer is part of the 'wider audience' you're looking to target.

First, I need to share how I ended up here instead of places like reddit, Digg, etc (which were 'things' at my time). I was an intern going to work at a large corporation for the first time, not really knowing much about the tech world or the people surrounding it. Sure, I had a facebook account and occasionally visited some other sites on the web, but for the most part I didn't bother with the news sites, even though I had browsed several (and various blogs).

I eventually ended up discussing technology and other aspects with my mid-30's boss, who realized I didn't have a good source for informed and intellectual conversations about technological topics. Do you know what he recommended? That I start to read Slashdot. And so I hopped on here ~ 5 years ago, and stuck around for reasons I'll get into later.

The important part of all of this is that it was the current community that brought me in. It was my boss recommending a site, not my own searches through the internet, that brought me here. I highly doubt that I'm alone in this regard. So I want to emphasize it once more: new users are brought in by the community.

So, why did I stay? I browsed for a while, reading comments and articles (I even read most of the articles when I started out). But the articles themselves weren't all that interesting, especially because I could find them elsewhere 4 days in advance. It was the comments. Being able to see and read well thought-out and reasoned viewpoints about topics, to learn about entirely new ideas in layman's terms, to have a system which makes discussions easy to follow in addition to promoting the meaningful comments (as opposed to reddit, which over-emphasizes upvotes and turns commenting into a contest). Nowhere else does this, reddit gets lost in upvote wars/groupthink, ars technica's comment system is appalling, CNN and pop-sci are populated by people who pride themselves on ignorance, etc. Slashdot is thee only place where once can come for these types of conversations.

In short, as so many other posters have already summarized, it is the commenting interface, and community around it, that makes Slashdot. As long as that stay intact, Slashdot will be ok.

Before I get into the main problem, I have to wonder what happened to noh8rz10's comment in the beta? It's very clearly formatted in classic, yet somehow that formatting got blown away in beta. You might want to look into that.

The major issue is the substantial increase in white-space. For example, in the classic picture above, one can plainly see 5 different comments (complete with sigs!), while the beta barely shows 4 (and no sigs). What this does is 'space out' the conversations and make them harder to follow, because one now has to spend even more time searching for them (scrolling up, down, etc).

The bigger whitespace problem, however, is the horizontal space. Conversations on Slashdot go well into 10's and 20's of replies, meaning that if there isn't enough space they'll become incredibly cramped and hard to read. As an example of a thread that's only 5-6 replies deep:betacurrentThe beta can literally only fit 2 posts! The current designs gets 5! Cutting out all that space on the right cramps the posts into an almost illegible format, with the benefit of showing absolutely nothing to the side! This isn't even deep into the replies!

This is THE problem because it stands to kill conversation by making the comment threads unreadable. The comments section becomes unwieldy long and cramped, discouraging people from reading or commenting at all. And when that happens, there aren't comments around to attract new users like myself, people go away, and revenue tanks.

To be perfectly honest, the other ascetic changes don't really matter all that much to someone my age. It looks a hell of a lot like you're trying to copy generic web 3.0 design garbage, but they don't impact the function much.

So, in summary, the main problem is the way comments are rendered in the new design. If you find a way to condense the vertical space and expand the horizontal, you can probably get through this ok, but if the comment format doesn't get updated then you'll be seeing community problems, which will leads to decreased visitors and eventually the death of the site.

I'd personally give it until after BETA is sorted out. If Dice somehow miraculously sorts out the commenting problem, Slashdot stands a chance as sticking around.
If they don't, then you'll definitely see an exodus.

There is, of course, the possibility that the users would migrate around to other sites that pop up in the interim (such as altslash) which would be the risk/trade off you'd make by waiting. It's difficult to assess how long you'd be able to wait before needing to actually get the site running, but I'd hazard the 'right after we hear a response from Dice about this topic' as the breaking point.

Narnie writes: I come to/. not for the nearly interesting pseudo-tech articles, but for the lively, self-moderated discussion. Today I'm bit surprised to see every discussion summarized to fuckbeta. Popping up all over the place there's discussionsaboutbeta and even alternatives being revived and created. As I tend not to RTFA, I haven't sampled the beta myself. So, I ask you guys, what's there to like about the BETA and what's there to loath?Link to Original Source

Slashdot users are extremely unhappy with the new Slashdot Beta design. The comment section of every single post is devoted to dissatisfaction with the new design....... The thing to keep in mind about community sites devoted to user generated content is that the users generate the content.

DroolTwist writes: My scoop? Slashdot beta sucks. I'm definitely joining slashcott. Thanks for the years of entertaining and knowledgeable discussion, slashdotters. While I mainly lurked, I learned so much from discussions.Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes: For many months now, people have been quietly redirected to slashdot's beta site (beta.slashdot.org). Any negative feedback of the beta is ignored and/or disavowed. The majority of viewers do not like the beta — resulting in major loss of viewership.

Will slashdot alienate existing users of the site and keep pushing the beta OR will it keep the users and boot the beta?

On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.

Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.

If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.

We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project. We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott

Forbo writes: Since the migration to Slashdot Beta was announced, it seems all meaningful discussion has been completely disrupted with calls to boycott and protest. Rather than pull an Occupy, what can be done to focus and organize the action? What is the end goal: To revert entirely to the previous site, or to address the problems with the new site?